I'll be honest: I don't really like how you're approaching this. It feels like a higher class of conspiracy theorizing I often see on the web in its constructio

I'll be honest: I don't really like how you're approaching this. It feels like a higher class of conspiracy theorizing I often see on the web in its construction, so I'll run through my issues point by point. 1 - The original title was sensationalist (and so is the article, really), and changing titles to be more useful to the average HN reader/removing clickbait is something that happens fairly often here. I don't expect this process to be perfect, and I regularly see posts with somewhat useless or one-word titles. It happens. I have yet to see a post from Dang I'd consider unreasonable (in several years of reading HN) so I'm inclined to have some faith in the mod team here. Further, I also think you have a lack of faith in the readership here - title quality is less important on HN than on any other similar site I've used (though I favor accuracy and find the current policies regarding them reasonable). 2 - Generally this means some users are flagging the article. I've flagged articles on occasion before, and it can cause an instant drop of several places on the front page. This regularly happens for sensational or political articles - even things verging on political I find of interest and would like to see discussed more. I chalk it up to the nature of the community. As for this going against YC interests or business model - I don't really see it. This isn't even a good attack on YC, it's an attack on rent-seeking and/or the work culture of startups. YC is an effort to make startup funding more accessible, equitable, useful, and wide-ranging (or at least, that's how it looks to me from the outside). Heck, they have RFSs that go in direct opposition to the kind of startups talked about in the article (and their interest in funding these kinds of things + moonshots are increasing, not decreasing). In short - I think you're pretty far off here, but you're free to read into it what you want.